Google has made two announcements related to its cloud computing services. First, it announced another price cut for Compute Engine. The price reductions range between 5 percent and 30 percent, depending on the instance type, and they are available to customers in North America, Europe and Asia.
Second, the company is adding a new pre-emptible VM option. These VMs offer all the same features as regular VMs but cost up to 70 percent less because they can be shut down to make room for other workloads if necessary. “While that may sound disruptive, it actually makes them a great choice for distributed, fault-tolerant workloads that do not require continuous availability of any single instance,” blogged Google Senior Product Manager Paul Nash. Observers say this new category of VM could be a good option for enterprises that have large batch workloads that are not time-sensitive.
